I agree with your basic premise, but I think the complaint about ME3 was that it didn't reflect any previous decisions you made in the ending, not that the story failed to fork exponentially at every decision point. Computer games are still a long, long ways away from anything like this: A Dungeon Master can react to your unexpected choices and set you in a standard "fetch the thing" quest but then react to you actually accidentally literally destroying the world when that wasn't written into their "plan", and then carry on with the resulting consequences if you like. It's a linear contribution you have to model the event and voice act it, etc., but it's still just two story nodes not significantly interacting with anything else.)įallout 1 & Fallout 2 were structured as several parallel instances of the first example, which is probably the best compromise you can make to prevent exponential explosion while still giving some heft to the choices.īut ultimately, if you want your "choices to matter", you'd better stick to "classic" roleplaying. (Note things like "whether or not a Krogan squad is there" are consequences, yes, but you'll note they do not impact the future flow of the story, so they don't contribute to a combinatorial explosion. You just can't let the combinatorics explode that much and make decisions that change the story. I remember thinking when I heard the announcement about the Mass Effect trilogy laughing at the idea that they could do it across three. Then companies promise the second, whether they mean to or not. The problem is, no matter how you disguise it, gamers sense in the first case that they're on some sort of rails. We'll probably have reasonable approximations of the former a long time before the latter!) (Sometimes I think that as impressive as the holodeck may have been on ST:TNG in terms of providing an immersive sensory experience, it's even more impressive in that it seems to have enough intelligence built in that it can actually do true reactive storylines and such.
Every year, as the standards go up, it is actually getting harder and harder to bring this level of responsiveness to a game. But it might be nice if the companies would stop promising this. It is not possible to have a true branching story where you can make dozens and dozens of meaningful choices and the story has fully rendered cutscenes with voice acting and unique locations and etc. I don't care in the slightest, because as someone who's been playing these games for a while and also as a programmer, I observe that what these companies are promising is basically impossible, so I never bought into this promise to be offended it didn't play out. We want to talk about Mass Effect right now, not fundamental existential ennui. Stepping up 6 meta levels and asking "Yeah, but what's life all really about anyhow?" is, you know, fine and all, but also in way, profoundly missing the point. The problem is that gamers were promised "decisions that matter" and in the end everybody got the same pre-canned three endings. It's a weird KOTOR B-Plot with the Star Wars filed off.) (Now, Anthem from a story perspective I have a lot less respect for. I think the ME3 ending even before the Extended Cut (and more importantly the final Citadel "cleanup" DLC) was better than a lot of gamers gave it credit for, but the problem with it was that it was a very hard situation to see the forest from your particular gameplay tree. Linearly in terms of that playthrough so many gamers felt they only had "one choice" at the end, and that is an amazing psychological trick because the statistics BioWare revealed show that among players that did complete the final choice it was an almost even split (and a surprising number of players took the interesting fourth choice of just quitting there and not making a choice). Which of those 3 buttons a player chose often says so much about their combined playthrough of all three games. The debate around the ME3 ending has left me with a lot more respect for the ME3 ending over time than after I played through it the first time. they promised your decisions matter but none of them do, you choose at the end between 3 buttonsĪt the end of the day your decisions still matter to you.
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